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Cash back for starters?
• LAST week the chair of the board of Homes for Islington (HfI) celebrated the housing authority’s apparent endorsement of its service by the Audit Commission (Three stars for starters, October 17).
But Adam Borrie almost certainly knows he is participating in a charade about HfI’s performance. I have obtained under the Freedom of Information Act the commission’s pre-publication report on HfI.
This was submitted in May following the inspection carried out over a month late last year. This report, not publicly available, awarded the housing authority just two stars.
I have also obtained under an FoI request – after some difference of opinion – the appeal written by Eamon McGoldrick, HfI’s chief executive, to the commission’s chief inspector of housing, Roy Irwin.
It was this five-page submission, made in June, which trumped the thousands of hours of inspection and the decades of experience of the inspectors to deliver an upgrade to three stars one month later.
Taken in all, this information shows the commission’s team of inspectors had serious concerns about HfI’s operations. That view was entirely consistent with a similar assessment carried out in an “indicative” report published two years previously. Nothing had changed.
Ironically, the inspectors’ real opinions are fully expressed in the final report. They have not chosen to radically edit the original text to reflect the revised final opinion. Rather, a one-sentence positive conclusion about an element of HfI’s service sits inconsistently
on top of damning observations. Draw your own conclusion. This is icing sugar slapped on pooh.
There is a blizzard of financial and factual information in the final report which should put the 39,000 households who have HfI as their landlord in an insurrectionary mood.
One stands out: HfI households are each paying an average figure of £573 annually for the service. This is 50 per cent above the median average charged by similar housing organisations in London and nationally.
So by my reckoning they are paying £191 above what they should be paying and collectively £7.5million annually over the odds.
For many pensioners, the £191 saving for starters will be the difference between life and death.
MICHAEL READ
Islington Leaseholders Action Group
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